Retail outlets (e.g., supermarkets, cafeterias, etc.) offer sale of various products and services. The outlets are typically equipped with self-checkout kiosks that allow a shopper to scan the products selected for purchase on their own to receive indicia of their prices. The shopper may then use the indicia to make a payment for completing the product purchase.
The products are available either as packaged items or fresh items for purchase. The packaged items typically carry identification markers such as bar codes and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, which are scanned by relevant scanners equipped with the self-checkout kiosks. However, the fresh items (e.g., freshly cooked meals such as different types of curries, pastas, and breads; various salads; fresh fruits and vegetables; etc.) are often untagged and/or unpacked, and require a store attendant to intervene for enabling their purchase. The store attendant traditionally uses his personal assessment of the type and number of ingredients for each fresh item and manually inputs the assessed information to a checkout kiosk for expected payment to complete the purchase.
Since the collection of fresh items at the retail outlets may change based on customer demand or product offerings, the assessed information may vary based on related inventory knowledge and skill of the store attendant. As a result, the assessed information may become susceptible to error and hence business loss. The probability of erroneous assessment increases when various fresh items are mixed together based on customer request or as a new product offering. Such assisted checkouts for fresh items may also become labor intensive and time consuming based on the quantity of fresh items being checked out. Further, customer queues may become bottlenecks during peak periods of customer demand, possibly to provoke the customers to leave the retail outlet to shop elsewhere. Other sales may be lost from customers who may simply avoid a retail location at known busy times and shop elsewhere, because of past inconvenience from delays.
Therefore, there exists a need for an automated object recognition kiosk for retail checkout of fresh foods and provide a seamless retail checkout experience for better customer service.